I've upvoted you because you make a good point, but I disagree. IMO, Fake News, in your restrictive definition, is to modern propaganda what Bootstrap is to modern frontend dev. It's an easy shortcut, widely known, and even talented operators are going to use it because it's the easiest way to control a (domestic or foreign) population. But resources are there, funding is there, to build much more subtle/complex systems if needed. Cut away Bootstrap, and you don't particularly dent the startup ecosystem. Cut away fake news, and you don't particularly dent the ability of troll farms to get work done. We're in a new era, fake news or not.

The drive to dilute the term is putting a lot of energy into making fighting fake news more difficult. There can be more than one bad thing happening in the world, but lumping them all together is just an excuse not to do anything about any of them.

Wasn't "fake news" a term popularised by someone accusing others of lying about him ? So that he'd look like the victim ?

Fake news was initially popularized in reference to hoaxes and propaganda being spread on the internet under the guise of legitimate news, and the effect that increasing public trust in such stories had on the recent Presidential campaign cycle.

Trump supporters found themselves more strongly associated with such stories than the Democrats (not surprising given his support among right-wing social media,) so they attempted to reframe "fake news" as, itself, a fake phenomenon invented by the left to discredit alternative media out of fear of the threat it presented to the leftist media establishment status quo.

This to further the narrative that the mainstream media was little more than a propaganda wing of the DNC and its globalist masters, and that any Trump-critical stories from the MSM were likely to be fabrications and thus not to be trusted (but you could trust those stories on your Facebook feed about HRC having Parkinsons' disease or running a child sex slave ring out of a pizza parlor.)

And then Trump himself picked up on it somehow and now likes to label anything and anyone that criticizes him as fake news.

Ironically, the least likely thing to be called fake news nowadays is news that is actually fake.

Right on. I've seen an incredible amount of misunderstanding, unusual for hackernews, in these comments.

If FOX news runs front-page mugshots non stop every time an immigrant commits a crime, that shows a massive bias and leads its readership to an incorrect worldview, but it's not "fake". If Honest Truth Online runs a story that a missing girl was murdered by an immigrant based on miniscule to no evidence, that's fake news.